My Turn: One good cliffhanger deserves another

“Because of our commitment and dedication to ideological posturing we have decided to play chicken with the national economy instead of doing the work that we have been sent to Washington to do. To that end we reached an agreement that if we failed to work out a compromise on how to address the economy by the end of 2012 cutbacks and restriction sufficiently severe to damage the fragile economic recovery from our recent recession would be automatically invoked. Our stated purpose in doing this was to collectively hold an economical gun to our own heads, which would frighten us in to doing our jobs of debating, compromising and then passing agreed upon legislation. We cobbled together an agreed upon financial time bomb with an 18-month fuse. We then proceeded to do nothing further to address the economic issues confronting us. We now find ourselves faced with going over the fiscal cliff’ that we fabricated. Oh, Oh, Oh!

Basically we see only two options:

1. Give in to the other side, shrug our shoulders and say we had to give in against our will to avoid the financial cliff.

2. Refuse to reach an agreement, shrug our shoulders and blame the other side for economic chaos we have created.

Either way, as soon as we get beyond this we’ll have the opportunity to do the very same thing over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling.

Once again ideology trumps integrity and precludes us from fulfilling the responsibility we accepted when we took our oath of office.”